Seventeen days across the Alps: from a French lake to a Roman arena, the slow way over the top

Annecy's old town is built along the Thiou, the short river that drains the lake, which was split into canals in the Middle Ages to run mills, tanneries and a cloth trade. The result is a set of arcaded streets on both banks with flowers on every parapet, and in the middle of the water a small triangular building with a pointed prow like a moored ship.

That is the Palais de l'Isle, put up around the twelfth century, and it has been in turn a house, a mint, a courthouse and a prison, the last of those until 1865 and again briefly under the German occupation. The cells are open and the graffiti is still on the walls. It takes half an hour and it is the most photographed thing in the Alps that is not a mountain.

Then walk five minutes to where the canal meets the lake, cross the bridge into the public gardens, and get in the water. There are free beaches inside the town, the lake is warm from late June, and the far shore is a wall of mountains that goes pink in the evening.

The castle stands on the rock directly above the old town and was the seat of the counts of Geneva from the thirteenth century, then of a branch of the House of Savoy. It burned, was rebuilt, became a barracks and was bought by the town in 1953. Inside there is a mixed museum: medieval sculpture, Savoyard furniture, alpine natural history and a floor on the lake itself, its geology and what lives in it.

The best part is the courtyard and the terrace, which give you the whole town from above, the canals cutting through it and the lake beyond, and cost nothing extra once you are in.

Higher again, on the hill behind, is the Basilica of the Visitation, finished in 1930 in a heavy neo-Romanesque that nobody would call beautiful. It holds the tombs of Francis de Sales and Jane de Chantal, who founded an order here in 1610, and the esplanade in front of it looks straight down the lake. Come down through the vineyard path and finish in the cathedral, a sixteenth century Franciscan chapel that ended up as the seat of a bishop, where Jean-Jacques Rousseau sang in the choir as a boy.

Give the lake a whole day. The cycle path runs from the middle of Annecy along the western bank on the bed of a railway closed in the 1960s, entirely flat, entirely separated from traffic, for about eighteen kilometres to the far end. Hire bikes near the gardens, reckon on ninety minutes each way, and stop at Duingt where a castle sits on a spit halfway down.

Swim at least twice. There are public beaches at Sevrier, Saint-Jorioz and Duingt, and the water at the southern end is shallow and warmer. Buy lunch at a bakery before you set off, because the good stops are between villages.

Come back by boat instead of riding both ways if the legs have gone: the lake steamers stop at most of the western villages and take bicycles. In the town, the animation museum near the castle is free, small and unexpectedly good, tied to the film festival Annecy has run since 1960, which is the most important animation festival in the world.

Three hours by way of Geneva puts you on the far shore of the same body of water with a different name and a different currency. Montreux comes with palm trees, a lakefront promenade of about seven kilometres, and the mountains standing up immediately behind the hotels.

Walk south along the quay for half an hour and Chillon appears: an oval of towers on a rock a few metres offshore, connected by a bridge. It was a Savoyard toll station on the road to the Great Saint Bernard pass, which meant nobody could get past it without paying, and it grew into a castle and a prison. Francois Bonivard was chained in the vaulted cellar for four years in the 1530s; Byron came through in 1816, wrote a poem about him and carved his own name on a pillar, which is still there behind glass. The castle is the most visited historic building in Switzerland and it earns it: forty rooms, painted ceilings, a chapel, and a walkway round the top with water on one side of the walkway and vineyards on the other.

On the way back along the quay, a bronze figure stands on the water with one fist up. Freddie Mercury and Queen took over the recording studio inside the casino at the end of the 1970s, and he spent much of his last decade in the town.

The train up the Rochers-de-Naye starts in the middle of Montreux, climbs through the vineyards and the woods, and finishes at 2,042 metres on a bare ridge with the whole of Lake Geneva laid out below and the Alps behind. It takes about fifty minutes and the gradient is such that the carriages are built on a slope.

At the top there is an alpine garden of a thousand species, a short circuit to the summit cross, and a colony of marmots kept in an artificial burrow system with viewing windows. It sounds like a gimmick and it is not: marmots from several continents, mostly asleep, occasionally screaming, and a good explanation of why an animal that hibernates for six months does anything at all.

Come down in the afternoon and spend it flat. The lakeside path north of Montreux runs to Vevey in about two hours, past bathing platforms, plane trees and the odd private beach, and there is a train back from anywhere along it.

Ten minutes along the shore is a smaller, quieter town that has been the headquarters of a very large food company since the nineteenth century and the retirement home of one of the most famous men of the twentieth.

Charlie Chaplin left the United States in 1952, was refused a re-entry permit while at sea, and settled in a manor house above Vevey with his family for the last twenty five years of his life. The house opened as a museum in 2016 with the rooms kept as they were and a purpose-built studio next door where his films are staged as sets you walk through. It is far better done than the concept suggests, and the park is beautiful.

In the afternoon, in the town itself, the food museum in the firm's former head office covers eating from every angle: agriculture, digestion, cooking, trade, with a working kitchen and a vegetable garden outside. And in the lake directly in front of it, an eight metre stainless steel fork stands upright in the water, planted there as a joke for the museum's tenth anniversary and never removed because everybody liked it.

The panoramic line leaves Montreux, climbs sharply out of the vineyards with the lake dropping away behind, crosses the Simmental in pastures and chalets, and comes down to Interlaken between two lakes. Change there for Lauterbrunnen, and change again onto the rack railway that climbs to Wengen.

Lauterbrunnen is worth the twenty minutes between trains. The valley is a flat green trench with vertical walls on both sides and seventy two waterfalls falling off them. The one directly behind the village drops nearly three hundred metres in a single free fall and turns to spray halfway down; Goethe stood underneath it in 1779 and wrote a poem about the spirits over the water.

Then up. The rack railway has climbed to Wengen since 1893, takes fifteen minutes, and delivers you to a village with no road in and no cars in it. Walk out to the church at the north end for the first proper look at what you have come for: three peaks across the valley, from the pasture at the bottom to the snow on top.

This is the expensive day and the one to spend a clear morning on. A rack railway climbs from Kleine Scheidegg into the north face of the Eiger, tunnels through it and through the Monch, and comes out at a station at 3,454 metres, the highest in Europe. It was begun in 1896, took sixteen years to build, and the men who dug it worked at altitude with hand drills and dynamite.

At the top there are galleries cut in the ice, a terrace on the ridge, and the Aletsch glacier running away south for twenty three kilometres, which is the longest in the Alps. Go on the first train, be back by early afternoon, and drink water: it is nearly three and a half kilometres above the sea, which people underestimate constantly.

The three peaks the line goes through are worth knowing by name from below, because you will be looking at them for four days. The Eiger is 3,967 metres and its north face is a concave wall nearly two kilometres high that was not climbed until 1938 and killed a great many people first. The Monch, the monk, stands between it and the Jungfrau, the maiden, which tops out at 4,158.

The best walk in the Jungfrau region is also the easiest, which almost never happens. A cable car climbs from Wengen to Mannlichen at 2,343 metres in five minutes. From the top station a path runs south to Kleine Scheidegg, about four and a half kilometres, losing barely a hundred metres of height the whole way, on a broad gravel track that a pushchair could manage.

What makes it is the orientation: the entire walk faces the three peaks head on, so the wall is in front of you rather than behind, and it changes shape as you go. Allow an hour and a half plus as long as you spend stopping, which will be considerable.

Above Kleine Scheidegg on the western side is the Lauberhorn, and dropping off it is the longest downhill course on the World Cup circuit, four and a half kilometres of it, with a section where racers leave the ground for forty metres. In summer it is a meadow with cowbells in it and a few marker posts, which makes the winter footage very hard to believe. Walk down from Kleine Scheidegg to Wengen if the legs are willing, about two hours through the alp pastures.

The western wall of the Lauterbrunnen valley has its own set of villages and its own cable car, and today crosses to them. From the valley floor a series of cabins climbs to Gimmelwald, Murren, Birg and finally the Schilthorn at 2,970 metres, where there is a revolving restaurant built in the late 1960s and finished with money from a film company, because a Bond film was shot up there in 1969 and the production paid for the building in exchange for using it.

The view is the other one: the same three peaks, but from the side and across the whole valley, with two hundred summits behind them on a clear day. Come down as far as Gimmelwald, a hamlet of about a hundred and thirty people with no road, no shops to speak of and hay barns standing between the chalets, and walk the path through it.

Finish on the valley floor at the Trummelbach, which is ten waterfalls inside the mountain. Meltwater off the three peaks has cut a shaft through the rock, and a lift built into the cliff takes you up inside it to galleries where twenty thousand litres a second goes past in the dark. It is loud, cold and wet, and it is the strangest half hour on this trip.

Three hours and two changes: down the rack railway to Lauterbrunnen, out to Interlaken, along the Thunersee to Spiez, through the Lotschberg to Visp in the Rhone valley, and then up the long dead-end valley to Zermatt. The last hour is the good one, climbing beside a grey river with the walls closing in.

Zermatt is car-free and has been since long before that was fashionable, which mostly means the taxis are electric and very quiet. Drop the bags and take the funicular, which is buried in the hillside and climbs to Sunnegga at 2,288 metres in under five minutes.

From there a chain of small lakes runs along the hillside, and the one nearest the top station reflects the Matterhorn almost perfectly on a still morning or evening. The mountain is 4,478 metres, has four faces pointing at the four compass points, and was the last great Alpine summit to be climbed: Edward Whymper's party reached the top on 14 July 1865, and on the way down a rope broke and four of the seven fell to the glacier. Three bodies were recovered. It made the mountain famous and effectively invented Zermatt.

The rack railway to the Gornergrat opened in 1898, was the first electric one in Switzerland, and climbs to 3,089 metres on a ridge above the glacier. Take the first train and sit on the right. At the top you are standing above a confluence of ice with twenty nine peaks over four thousand metres around you, which is more than anywhere else in the Alps.

The mass filling the eastern horizon is Monte Rosa, whose highest point at 4,634 metres is the highest ground in Switzerland, and the Gorner glacier curls out of it below you. There is a walk down to the intermediate station at Rotenboden in about forty minutes, passing a small lake that gives the reflection everyone came for.

In the afternoon, the other system. A chain of cabins runs from the far end of the village to the Matterhorn Glacier Paradise at 3,883 metres, the highest that any cable car in Europe goes, holding an ice palace cut into the glacier and a viewing platform reached by a lift through the rock. It is around thirty degrees colder up there than in the village and the air is very thin. Go up, look, and come down before the thin air gives you a headache.

The long leg. Down the valley to Visp, through the Simplon tunnel into Italy, across to Milan and east to Verona: close to six hours, and the temperature climbs about fifteen degrees while you sit there. Somewhere around Domodossola the roofs change from slate to tile and the language changes with them.

Verona in the early evening is the right time to arrive. Walk from the station up to Piazza Bra and the Arena is standing in the middle of it: pink limestone, first century, the third largest amphitheatre to survive anywhere, and still in use. Most of the outer ring came down in an earthquake in 1117 and a fragment of it is left standing at one side like a piece of scaffolding.

Then walk through to Piazza delle Erbe, which was the Roman forum and is now a long market square with frescoed houses down both sides, a fountain with a fourth century Roman statue on it, and cafe tables from end to end. The street connecting the two squares is closed to traffic and functions as the town's living room from six o'clock onwards.

Go into the Arena first thing, when the tiers are empty and you can climb to the top row. It was built in the first century AD to hold around thirty thousand people, has been in continuous use for two thousand years, and since 1913 has staged opera every summer, which is why there are stage flats stacked outside it all season. The acoustics are so good that nothing is amplified.

Then the tower on Piazza delle Erbe. It was begun in 1172, struck by lightning, finished in 1463 at eighty four metres, and a lift now covers most of the climb. From the top you get the whole pink city inside the river loop, the hills behind it and the roof of the Arena from above, which is the view that explains the plan of the place.

In the afternoon walk north to Sant'Anastasia, the largest church in the city, Gothic, brick and largely unfinished on the outside. Inside, on the wall of the Pellegrini chapel, is Pisanello's fresco of Saint George setting off to kill the dragon: the saint climbing onto his horse, the princess watching, and a row of hanged men on gibbets in the background. Two hunchbacks carved in stone hold up the holy water stoups by the door and everybody rubs them.

Castelvecchio was built in the 1350s by one of the Scaligeri lords as a fortress against his own citizens, with a fortified bridge across the river so he could get out. What makes it exceptional is not the castle but what Carlo Scarpa did to it between 1958 and 1964: a restoration that stripped out fake medieval additions, left the scars visible, and hung the sculpture on steel frames in raw concrete settings. It is one of the most admired museum conversions in the world and architects come to Verona specifically for it. The equestrian statue of Cangrande, grinning under his helmet, is displayed on a concrete beam in the open air.

Walk back into town through the Porta Borsari, a Roman gate of the first century now stranded in a run of shops, with premises pressed hard against each flank. Nobody stops.

In the afternoon go ten minutes west to San Zeno. The basilica is twelfth century Romanesque, tall, striped and calm, with a rose window carved as a wheel of fortune and a pair of bronze doors covered in forty eight panels of biblical scenes and local miracles, cast between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries and among the most important bronzes to survive from the Middle Ages. Over the altar is Mantegna's altarpiece of 1459. The crypt below is where Shakespeare has Romeo and Juliet secretly married.

Forty five minutes south by train is a small city on three artificial lakes that the Gonzaga family ruled for nearly four centuries and spent most of the money on art. It is quieter than Verona, flatter, mistier, and holds two rooms that are worth the day on their own.

The first is in the ducal palace, which is not a palace so much as five hundred rooms knocked together over three hundred years. In a tower of it, Andrea Mantegna spent nine years painting a single chamber for the marquis: the family and their court on the walls, life size, looking back at you, and above them a ceiling that opens into a painted circular balustrade with a blue sky, putti leaning over the rail and a peacock. It was finished in 1474 and it is the first time anyone had painted an illusionistic ceiling like that. Book it, because entry is timed and limited.

The second is at the far end of town in the pleasure palace Giulio Romano built for Federico Gonzaga in the 1520s. In the Room of the Giants the whole surface of the walls and ceiling is one continuous painting of mountains falling on the Titans, with no corners, no frames and the floor originally cobbled so nothing was level. It was designed to frighten guests and it still works. On the way between them, stop at Sant'Andrea, which Alberti designed in 1470 as a Roman temple front with a barrel vault behind it, and which every architect in Italy then copied for two centuries.

Across the river, behind a plain gate on a plain street, is one of the oldest surviving Renaissance gardens in Italy, laid out around 1580. A single avenue of cypresses runs straight up from the house to a rock face, and cut into that rock is a grotesque stone mask with a mouth you can walk into. Above it a stair climbs to a belvedere with the whole city below.

Goethe came here in 1786 and took a cypress branch away with him. It is a quiet forty minutes, it is fifteen minutes from the station, and it is a better last thing than a shop.